First of all: work on Lilith is proceeding, I have sent to editor 90% of the script, and I’m just polishing some endings right now before I sent them also the final part. There’s still a LOT of art, so estimate deadline for beta is still around end of September/mid-October.

And now, back to the topic of this post! This is both a post about my indie career and also a sort of advice. As a certain Einstein once said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.

How does this apply to the indie dev world? Simple: if you’re struggling with your career, have you considered trying new things?

First a premise: I’m not saying that changing is always good. On the opposite, if you have your definite “style”, if you have already enough fans that like it, in general if you’re happy both financially and personally about “your legacy”, then there’s really little reason (if none!) to change.

But what if you’re unhappy with the results you’re getting and don’t know what to do?

Several years ago, I used to chat with a dev who was using RPGmaker XP to make RPGs. Nothing wrong with that tool, it’s a very saturated market, but you could say the same about VNs as well.

The issue was that they were unhappy, but at same time they had this total mind-closure, using always the default assets, spending little on music, never trying anything new. Because the problem wasn’t RPGMaker XP itself (many successful games were made and are still being made with that tool) but the unwillingness to change and to challenge yourself.

The four years cycle

In my indie career, this happened already many times. Curiously, at regular intervals of 4 years (not always, but most of the times). Let’s see:

2004 – when I started around this year I was doing sports, simulation, wargames. More complex games in general, using C++ and a custom library called PTK
2008 – this year things changed: I discovered visual novels and learned to use Ren’Py
2012 – things changed again: I tried to do RPG/VNs and learned python (knowing Ren’Py doesn’t necessarily mean you also know python well)
2016 – once again tried something different: my first card game (PSCD). In 2017 I also tried my first crafting game (Amber’s Magic Shop)
2020 – I did my first Kickstarter (TFTU: Hazel), and my first yuri-only game (Volleyball Heaven). Since then doing yuri games helped me greatly on Steam
2024 – my first psychological horror / adventure game (House of Chavez) and maybe… first town building sim (Thieves of Dingirra)? haha we’ll see, but more likely next year!

Changes can be radical like switching to a completely different genre, to more subtle ones like changing art style, setting, etc. It can also be using a different tool, though this is a big change and usually takes a lot of time.

There are so many things you can try in game development. Even within the same genre and engine, you can create games that are very different from each other! For example, I reused my RPG framework that I coded for games like Loren The Amazon Princess, Seasons Of The Wolf, etc to create a sci-fi game like Planet Stronghold 2. Or back in 2010, I did two visual novels using western-comic art style (Vera Blanc). They didn’t do well (although I suspect not for the style but the quality of the drawings) but at least I tried.

If you try something new, you can say “well, I tried, didn’t work.” If you never try, you’ll always live with the regret “I wonder if I tried that, what might have happened…?” I know for certain that if back in 2008 I didn’t try Ren’Py and visual novels, probably now I wouldn’t be here writing this blog post, because it was a turning point in my career (and the same I can say about what happened in 2012 and also in 2020!).

What’s next?

As I wrote, this year I released my first pyschological horror game, which also was my first VN/adventure game mix. It was well received in general. Of course, people who were interested only in… the sex stuff, didn’t like to have to use the brain to walk through the adventure part haha (but that’s why I put a full guide on Steam!).

Personally, I was a bit burned out last year after ToA: An Elven Marriage, and working on House of Chavez was really a nice change. I really enjoyed working on that game, because was different than a plain simple VN, with a map, an inventory, interacting with environment, etc etc, but not as complex as doing a full RPG. Main issue is that doing such a game requires a lot of art (all the backgrounds) and time, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to do another, though I hope soon.

This year after Lilith release I should also work on Thieves Of Dingirra, which could have (I’m not sure yet if that will be doable with Ren’Py) a sort of simplified town sim gameplay. I admit I’m a bit scared of coding that part, and worse case will be just a “regular” RPG, but I want to try adding the town sim element too if possible.

In any case, the important is to keep trying new things, also because otherwise it can get a bit boring!

Ahaha, enigmatic title, isn’t it? I’ll explain it shortly. But first, an update on TFTU: Lilith! Things are going smoothly, and I’m confident that the game will be out this fall, maybe even October. Mostly depends on the artists’ speed (but I don’t want to rush their work).

Screw socials!

Back to the topic of this post: as you know, recently I reduced my time in socials, and focused more on my “true fans”. It’s too early to draw conclusions on the financial side, but for sure on the personal side, it was one of the best choices I’ve made in last years.

Socials are becoming really terrible. Full of AI bots, providing zero exposure, and just being an annoyance more than a plus. Of course I know well that you can’t do entirely without them, and I still keep posting. But no way I’m spending a lot of time on those. I know, I’m going against all common advice, but keep in mind I’ve been around since 20 years, I have already a following, I do niche games, etc. So what works for me might be entirely wrong for someone else and vice versa.

The wishlists madness

I also think that Steam itself is turning into a kind of “social platform” in a negative way. Marketing gurus say you need 7k wishlists to make it big with new games. But now that the information is public, then what? Now there are millions of developers all hustling to get those wishlists, maybe not even focusing on actually making the game better. It’s turned into a mad rush, everyone pushing against each other in a super crowded space, with the age-old question: how do you stand out when there’s so much competition? With 30+ games launching every day, and seemingly everyone with a computer thinking, “Hey, why not make an indie game?” – it’s just not enjoyable for me anymore.

You might be thinking, “Now that things are tougher, you get out.” And you’re partly right. It’s clear that when a platform is overflowing with competition, it’s tough, and all your efforts seem to have less impact. So, I believe it’s smarter to focus on promoting my own website, Patreon, Discord, building my own community. When you pay for ads to direct people to your Steam page, there are countless “exit points” – links, buttons, thumbnails – where potential customers can click and end up buying another game (usually from the same handful of AAA titles or indie darlings that dominate promotion 99% of the time). But with my own site, even if they click on another game page, they’re still buying my games.

The real reason why I went indie

However, the financial side is just one reason why I chose the indie path. Honestly, if it were just about money, I’d probably quit right now. But I’m older, and while I know how to code, I’m not a pro, and I don’t possess any extraordinary skills. I’ve seen plenty of other indie devs call it quits and move on to lucrative jobs in banks or other big corporations, making ten times the money they did before. Good for them! Just not my thing.

The other (and more important) reason why I chose the indie path is the direct connection with fans and customers. I genuinely enjoy interacting with them (whenever I have the time, of course!), hearing what they like or dislike about my games, and considering their suggestions and critiques. Even have them directly involved in development through crowdfunding rewards like drawing characters outfits or naming places in my fantasy world. These are things that will forever remain in my games, and I think they really appreciate that level of engagement. This aspect is priceless to me and helps maintain the human element in game development.

Otherwise, I might as well be a robot, endlessly churning out 500 social media posts a day in hopes of hitting the 7,000 wishlists mark for the Steam lottery. No thanks! As long as I can keep doing things the way I am now, I’ll stick with it. If there comes a time when even that’s not feasible anymore, I’ll just move on and do something else, maybe even something completely unrelated to computers!

Thank you for listening to my rant, and I hope you’re getting my games in the current Summer sales:

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/pub/winterwolves

itchio: https://winter-wolves.itch.io/

It’s that time of year again, where I pause to take a look at the situation, as we’ve reached the exact midpoint of the year.

Of course, the game I’m working on is TFTU: Lilith, and I plan to show some progress in the coming months. In case you missed it, I’m reducing my time spent in socials, just an update a week, and instead focusing on my Discord and my Patreon. Patreon in particular will be updated almost daily, with more free base content unlocked a few days after the members.

At the time of writing this post I haven’t received the funds yet, but if all goes well I’ll start commissioning artists to produce more work, since many stretch goals were reached. I can say without doubt that this will be the game of the series with the most content!

Because of all the content, the game might take longer than planned, just for the time needed to produce art. In this case, while I wait for it and have finished writing the whole story, I might start to work on the next big project, Thieves of Dingirra.

Thieves of Dingirra gameplay

I’m still doing tests with the gameplay part, since story-wise I have everything more or less planned, almost all the characters and scenes laid out (of course when I get to actually write it, I might get inspiration to write more scenes or do things slightly differently).

Haha, to paraphrase the famous saying “to gameplay or not to gameplay”? I must confess that it’s always been a dilemma for me to decide whether incorporating gameplay into my narrative-driven games was a good or a bad idea. For games where I could easily put a “visual novel mode”, like my RPG or card games, that wasn’t an issue, since players could always play the game like that. But for other kind of games, like Roommates (scheduler) or the recent House of Chavez (you could skip minigames but not the adventure part) this wasn’t possible.

In Thieves of Dingirra it would be a bit hard to offer a visual novel mode since the story would progress as you conquered the city step by step. I guess I could simulate that somehow. Or maybe, if there’ll be fights, I could add an auto-skip option.

As you see there’s still a lot of things to think about, and it’s what I’ll do in the coming months, while I wait for art for Lilith and/or take a break between writing a scene and another.

After this, what?

I believe Thieves of Dingirra crowdfunding might start this fall, and will surely take me several months to do that game (even if I decide to make it visual novel only, there’s a big cast). After that, the next big project will be the second Loren spin-off, Reign of War. Even if that game should take me less time than An Elven Marriage, due to the fact that I’ll reuse the battle system (without doing any changes this time! just different skills and items) and that I have already a draft done (this story is what Loren 2 originally was supposed to be), I am surely not going to do that game immediately after Thieves of Dingirra though, since I’ll need a break.

So, I have in mind a few small projects that I will do as I take a break after Thieves of Dingirra and the next big RPG. Also because so far all those “smaller projects” gave me very good ROI, even better than the big games, which is kind of hilarious – it’s starting to be better to make smaller games than bigger ones… what a weird market!

That’s all for now, see you next month with an update on Lilith development!

I’m happy to announce that the Kickstarter for the third and last game in the Tales From The Under-Realm series, Lilith, has launched!

For more info about the game, you can check the official campaign page here. And here’s the official trailer:

As I already mentioned before, this game will be very dark, probably more than the two previous titles of the series. I’ll put trigger warnings of course, but be warned!

For those into adult stuff, it will also have very hot stuff, things never seen before in any of my games (and if you think I’m exaggerating, just wait until you play certain scenes! haha).

Also, the game will be way bigger than the two previous titles, with a longer story, more character interactions, and of course different endings.

Speaking of the two love interests:

Evelyn needs no introductions if you played After Midnight, but for those who didn’t (what are you waiting for?! hehe) she’ll be the classic “can I fix her” romance plot. She’s not a monster, but because of what happened to her life, she seems unable to feel emphaty for others. Also, she starts the story as straight character, since this is a setup that a lot of players asked for in the past, so I think it will be interesting to interact with her also because of this.

With Odette instead, I wanted both a strong, determined character, who had a troubled past of sins and submission to the order (and a specific character, which I won’t spoil for now). She has a lot of regrets for what she did in the past, and her mind is still trying to get out of the manipulations she was victim in the past.

Differently from Evelyn, she’s openly lesbian although she thinks she can’t love (or be loved) anymore because of her past.

New social media strategy

After the Kickstarter ends, I’ll also change my social media strategy to… no social media haha. For real, I’ll probably post a sort of weekly update, but no more posting every day a different screenshot. I did that for my previous two games, House of Chavez and ToA: An Elven Marriage, and the results were bad (to use an euphemism!). I won’t go too much in details but basically posting every day, with a different screenshot, make videos, reddit posts, cross-posting on mastodon/bluesky, etc etc. I tried literally everything, and it produced MINIMUM results. Totally irrelevant!

My situation at home has changed so I have less free time, but even if it hadn’t, I don’t want to waste so much time to post in socials, only to feed the big tech with free content so they can make money with ads and I get nothing in exchange. In recent times I spoke with some indies who basically have minimum social presence and they’re all doing fine focusing on the games themselves and promoting their own site, Kickstarter, Patreon and so on.

Of course, I’ll reply to questions and I’ll be present in my Discord and forums, but apart that, I’ll focus on the games and not post stuff in socials! So, a weekly post update, some posts when there are sales, but that’s it, nothing else.

Time flies! Seems yesterday as I wrote this other post when I celebrated my 40th birthday: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2014/04/my-first-40-years-10-as-indie/

And here we’re again, 10 years later, but still going!

In retrospect, looking back at how the market was when I wrote that post, things were going rather well. My games finally were on Steam, Loren The Amazon Princess had a great reception. I had just released Roommates, my second most successful game after Loren. Mobile games were still very profitable, and I was still selling direct rather well!

For comparison, the gross revenues of that year (2014) of my direct sales (I was using BMT at the times) is higher than my past year Steam revenues!!! As I’m writing this, I can’t believe it myself, but it’s true.

So things changed a lot during those 10 years (for the worse, lol) business wise. I had my Google account banned by the “modern inquisition”. Of course, it’s not all negative! I had some more successes (like Cursed Lands, my second most popular RPG!) or the recent Tales From The Under-Realm series which albeit shorter games, have a very good ROI.

In summary I made several more games, some successful, others not. I started making some yuri games only (just recently though, first one was Volleyball Heaven in 2020!). I had my games ported on console. I did my first crowdfunding campaign. And so on.

As I’m writing this, I just got my next game, House of Chavez, approved by Steam, and I’m happy to announce that it will be out the 22nd of this month. You can wishlist the game here.

Mid-life crisis ?

Haha no, I’m not having a mid-life crisis! However, I must say that while going from 30 to 40 years wasn’t a big step, somehow I feel reaching 50 as something “different”. Even if I’m good health, I probably have lived more than half of my time on Earth. I am very grateful for my life so far. Being able to be my own boss, live with my wife far away from the polluted and chaotic cities in middle of nature has been a real blessing. I wouldn’t exchange this with all money and success in the world!

However, I’m also a competitive person (even if maybe it doesn’t look like from the outside). So I want to explore new opportunities in future. Which ones? I have no clue yet! For sure, trying new games genres or mix VN with new gameplay like the House of Chavez (point and click adventure). Perhaps also trying to do something different from games, like comics (of course with a crowdfunding campaign). Or still make story-based games but with more animation and interaction (I’m preparing an animated intro for Tales From The Under-Realm: Lilith game and it’s turning out well!). Or maybe, still do narrative games but with a different focus. I admit I really liked doing the scary part of House of Chavez, and I think I’d like to do a “real horror game”, Bloodborne-inspired. I have already a lot of ideas in mind.

But if I don’t manage to do all those things, it will be fine. I like the kind of games I do, enough people like them to let me survive, and sometimes you just need to be happy with what you have, without eternally chasing what you think will be more successful!

Conclusions

When you reach my age, you’ve seen things… ROFL OK, seriously. When you reach certain milestones, like being 50, you start to appreciate other things in life beside career and money. I have talked about my business, but right now I’m mainly thinking about how I want to live the rest of my life. I lost many pets, and several people, some were friends or other indies, and younger than me. So all those events really make you stop and think about life in general.

Indeed, I also want to start enjoying life a bit. Because of all the pets, I really didn’t take a break in 20 years, a proper holiday away from home. It was a personal choice, but I’m starting to feel the need to travel and explore the world, maybe to get inspiration for future projects.

If you’ve read until this, thanks for your patience. I hope your life is going well for you too. I hope you don’t have too many regrets (I really don’t have many!) and that the future will be full of positivity for you and your beloved ones.